Sabrina Carpenter, Olivia Rodrigo, Gracie Abrams among pop stars 'picking up on the legacy of that '90s rock heritage' and headlining music festivals

A quick glance at this year’s festival lineups and you’ll get it: This one’s for the girls.

Lollapalooza unveiled its lineup on March 18, which features Olivia Rodrigo and Sabrina Carpenter as headliners and Gracie Abrams as a top-billed artist. The festival, to be held in Chicago from July 31 to Aug. 3, is one of many that’s turned its attention to female artists in a big way. It’s significant, after all, to have women who’ve often been described by their overlapping fan bases as “pop girls” take up space in a traditionally male-dominated scene.

Consequence of Sound reported that this is the first time a rock band won’t be headlining the music festival. But subscribing to this statement depends on what your definition of a rock band is.

“That’s only if you define those artists as not rock bands, but for the most part, they are,” critic and author Rob Sheffield tells Yahoo Entertainment. “They’re rock singers with rock bands behind them.”

Rodrigo, Carpenter and Abrams, Sheffield noted, are girls with guitars “who are doing sort of what rock stars in the ’'90s were doing.” They can reach massive crowds and put on shows that entertain people beyond their diehard fans.

“You’d have to have a pretty arcane definition of rock and roll if it doesn’t include a live Olivia Rodrigo show. … Same with Sabrina. Same with Gracie,” he says. “They’re very much daughters of Taylor Swift that way, who is really the one who sort of defined the sense of what is rock and roll right now in terms of an arena rock attack.”

It’s not just Lollapalooza. This summer, female acts are taking center stage at several festivals worldwide. Girl group Twice is the first female K-pop act to headline Lollapalooza Chicago. At Glastonbury, the presence of Gen Z female acts is strong, with artists like Abrams, Raye and beabadoobee all slated to perform. Abrams, along with Rodrigo, who’s a top-billed artist for Bonnaroo in Manchester, Tenn. and the Governor’s Ball in New York, among others, will also headline Osheaga in Montreal. Charli XCX is set to headline Glastonbury after she takes her “Sweat Tour” to Indio, Calif. for Coachella, where Lady Gaga will make her festival return on the main stage after eight years. Blackpink’s Lisa and Jennie are also scheduled to make their solo Coachella debuts.

Not everyone is impressed with the boom in female headliners. Online, some veteran festival attendees feel as though this year’s Lollapalooza roster, for instance, mainly caters to “young teens.” On the Lollapalooza subreddit, one commenter wrote that there’s too much “girly pop.”

“That’s always the case with the existence of pop music, especially pop music when it’s explicitly produced by and marketed towards a female audience,” Paula Harper, a musicologist at the University of Chicago, told Yahoo. “There’s always a certain amount of resistance that comes from a set of really deeply baked-in cultural codes and assumptions and stereotypes about devaluing things that are associated with girls and girlhood.”

The resistance to feminism in the festival landscape isn’t new. Despite being part of a “massive change” in early '90s rock, Sheffield explains, women seldom appeared on the lineup. What’s happening now, with Rodrigo, Carpenter, Abrams and Charli dominating at festivals, he said, is something of a “’90s dream” fulfilled. These are artists who have taken what used to be a “smaller-scale indie feminist aesthetic” to the “arena rock level.”

“[It’s] a logical continuation of what was happening in the '90s in terms of these artists who certainly see the live aesthetic as a huge part of what they do,” he says. “These artists that we’re talking about are pop stars, but musically, they’re rock stars.”

The '90s saw the boom of female rock representation, with rock stars and singer-songwriters like the Breeders, Alanis Morissette, Liz Phair and Fiona Apple rising to prominence on “both the indie level and the mainstream pop level.” Festivals started trending toward the inclusion of female artists in their lineups, but Woodstock '99 fueled toxic masculinity in those spaces. As a result, the status quo remained, and the booking of all-male lineups continued into the early 2000s.

“It’s very different now,” Sheffield said. “It seems like artists like Gracie, Sabrina, Olivia, Chappell [Roan] and Charli, and we could mention many more, are picking up on the legacy of that '90s rock heritage. That’s why they are so perfectly designed to be festival acts.”

Roan’s daytime set at last year’s Lollapalooza drew what was believed to be the largest crowd in the festival’s 30-plus-year history. Huston Powell, a promoter for C3 Presents, the company in charge of booking the Chicago festival, told Billboard that by “sheer appearance” it was clear the majority of festivalgoers were watching her. Roan’s record-breaking set last year and the large number of female acts being booked for festivals this year doesn’t seem like a coincidence.

“It was a phenomenon as soon as they announced that Chappell was going to be doing the Lollapalooza set,” adds Sheffield. “It came to a point where the idea of a live Chappell show in an outdoor venue was bigger than the rest of the festival combined, and that’s definitely the phase we live in.”

The increased number of female artists playing festivals, Harper added, may also be attributed to the resurgence of recession pop: dancey, upbeat pop music that elicits feelings of radical optimism amid a period of economic strife.

“Lady Gaga’s new album Mayhem and the single ‘Abracadabra’ feels like a real return to form in those big, early smash albums of hers like The Fame,” she said. “Those were coming out at a time right after the 2008 recession, where there was massive economic insecurity. There’s this maybe seemingly unintuitive pairing of times that are pretty economically bad with really robust, ‘dance your ass off’ pop music.”

For Harper, the reason festivals are booking major female artists likely comes down to one thing: the payout. Gaga grossed $804.8 million from her eight headlining tours. Rodrigo’s “Guts World Tour” is the highest-grossing tour by an artist born this century, earning $186.6 million in ticket sales. And Blackpink’s “Born Pink World Tour” is the highest-grossing tour by a female and Asian group, having earned more than $331.8 million in revenue. Carpenter, Charli and Abrams have each embarked on their own sold-out arena tours too.

“The bottom line is that it is lucrative,” Harper says. “It’s lucrative to get a bunch of folks who are engaged with mainstream popular music there. We’re in a time when massively selling out concerts and massively up-charging tickets are the norm for this kind of music. It’s unsurprising to me that this pivot is happening, purely from an economic, industrial angle.”

While there isn’t one reason why female artists have emerged at the top of festival lineups this summer, it’s a moment in the cultural zeitgeist that doesn’t look to be going anywhere anytime soon.

“This is one of those moments in pop history where you look around at the present, and you’re seeing the future happen right before our eyes,” Sheffield says. “This, I think, is the future. And it’s been a long time coming.”